Understanding Shame

Shame seems to be a taboo subject. Nobody wants to feel it and definitely not admit to it. Shame is like a shadow cast across a landscape that dulls the colour. Humans will do a lot to avoid embarrassment, a low level experience of shame. It is deeply uncomfortable and I think it has a huge impact on our lives, our understanding of ourselves and our culture.

* see Brene Brown for a great video on this 

I have been circling this project for most of my adult life. It was not hard to see the connection between Aboriginal dispossession and my own self sufficiency from the first time I woke up to the truth about Australian History in the early 1980’s. I just didn’t look too hard because it was almost immediately obvious that I would have to deal with some difficult emotions so instead I became a self righteous advocate for other peoples rights. Pointing the finger at the ‘great uneducated’ mass of white Australians and distinguishing myself as someone who ‘understood’ and sympathised. The Northcote Koorie mural was devised from this position.

Not that I regret doing it and am even a little bit proud of the fact that it became so important to people but now is the time to look hard at the context that it arose in and share honestly my journey from that point to now.

KELOID is a project that represents some kind of closing of a circle of learning that began

30 years ago with the Koorie Mural. This of course doesn't mean that the circle is complete. It is now just a drop in a huge pond of knowledge that I am now exploring which includes understanding 'whiteness'. I have a sense that the pond is just a drop in an ocean!

1988 at La Peruse - Sandra Onus and me painting banner before Australia Day Protest